by Penny Jordan
She wanted to tell him to go, she ought to tell him to go, but somehow the words stuck in her throat, tears shimmering at the back of her eyes. Why on earth was he doing this? It would surely suit his purpose far more if she were to lose her crop? She couldn’t believe he was actually offering to help her.
Her throat stung with weak, silly tears. It was almost too much for her to take in that this man, who had every reason in the world for standing aside and letting disaster strike her, was actually reaching out a hand to help her. It confused her, threw her off guard, made an almost painful happiness flower deep inside her.
‘It’s time we got started,’ Neil warned her.
The sun was already up, the air still with the threat of thunder. Trying to gather her scattered wits, Rue told him which rows of flowers needed to be picked; how to pick them and how to put them in the wide trugs she had brought down with her. Trembling a little, she directed him to one row of flowers as she started working on another.
Her awareness of his presence made her tense and clumsy, so that for the first half-hour he was almost outpacing her as they worked, but then gradually her tension slipped away as the need to work as fast as they possibly could overwhelmed everything else. At eleven o’clock, despite the fact that they had been working without a rest from five, they had cleared barely a third of the rows.
‘Time for a break, I think,’ Neil announced, straightening up and stretching.
Her own back felt as though it was on fire, but Rue stubbornly refused to move.
‘There isn’t time,’ she told him grittily, ‘but if you want a rest, go ahead.’
He came over and took the secateurs and the basket away from her.
‘A rest now will give you more energy for later,’ he told her firmly. ‘We’ll go back to the cottage and have something to eat and drink.’ And somehow or other, before she could raise any further objection, Rue found that she was firmly but gently being guided away from the field.
They spent barely half an hour in the kitchen drinking the coffee Rue had made and eating the sandwiches Neil had insisted they both needed. Her back had ceased to feel as though it was on fire and about to break in two, and the tension which had made her deny that she needed a rest had eased as well, and with it the headache that had been threatening.
Unwilling to acknowledge that Neil had been right to insist that they had a rest, Rue walked silently at his side as they headed back to the fields.
‘There’s no need for you to do any more,’ she told him abruptly.
‘That bad, am I?’ he queried ruefully, smiling at her in a way that made her heart suddenly somersault.
Rue shook her head, unwilling to speak in case her voice betrayed her. In point of fact, he had worked so swiftly and efficiently that she herself had been hard put to it to keep pace with him.
Now, despite the fact that there were no clouds in sight, the sky had a brassy cast to it and there was not a breath of air.
‘Phew, you can almost feel the thunder in the air, can’t you?’ Neil commented, tugging off his T-shirt in a movement that made Rue fascinatedly aware of the smooth movement of his muscles. His skin was lightly tanned, the fine, dark hairs covering his chest narrowing down over his stomach.
Rue watched him out of the corner of her eye, wanting to look away and yet somehow unable to do so.
‘Come on, back to work,’ he told her cheerfully, reaching out and placing a firm hard hand on the nape of her neck.
The effect of his touch was electrifying. She could feel a fine tremor start in the pit of her stomach and spread out to every part of her body. His touch scorched her, branded her, and yet she was unable to pull herself away from it, and in some unspoken way he knew what was happening to her. His hand tensed against the back of her neck and then relaxed, his fingers gently caressing her nape.
Rue felt stifled, threatened, and as much terrified by her own reactions to his touch as she was by the fact that he was touching her. She drew a deep breath and pulled away from him, saying shakily, ‘Don’t touch me.’
The brooding look he gave her made her stomach melt, and she had to fight to stop herself being drawn towards him. It was the thunder in the air that was having such an odd effect on her, she told herself shakily, as she turned her back on him and walked away from him. Yes, that must be what it was. It was the threat of thunder and the anxiety that were making her behave so oddly.
They worked until one, and this time it was Rue who called a halt. She must have felt like this before, she acknowledged as she straightened her aching back, but if so she couldn’t remember it. She felt as though she would never be able to walk upright again.
‘Lunch,’ she told Neil briefly, barely able to find the energy to speak.
To her anger, he shook his head, and then motioned towards the clouds gathering on the horizon.
‘If we stop now, we’ll lose half an hour,’ he told her grimly, ‘and by the way that cloud’s moving, we’ve got three hours at the most before the storm hits us.’
As she looked towards the horizon, Rue realised that what he said was true. A sick feeling of despair twisted her stomach and she looked from the sky to the field in front of them. They had worked hard and cleared well over half of the plants that needed cutting, but as she looked at the work which was still to be done, the lines of colour wavered in front of her eyes. She wasn’t going to cry. She couldn’t cry, not now, not in front of him.
Gritting her teeth, she bent back over the seemingly never-ending rows of flowers. Alongside her she could hear Neil working. Horatio growled and whined, moving uneasily.
‘He doesn’t like thunder,’ she told Neil as he straightened his back and looked at the dog. ‘I found him in a thunderstorm. He’d been abandoned,’ she added tersely.
‘Mmm. I bet you didn’t know what sex he was when you took him home,’ Neil responded in a grunt.
Rue felt irrationally hurt, although she knew the jibe was well-deserved. She worked as she had never worked in her life before, and Neil kept pace with her. No, Neil set the pace, she acknowledged tiredly as she saw him move slightly ahead of her and instantly redoubled her own efforts to catch up with him.
During the middle of the afternoon, she felt the sudden drop in temperature and her scalp prickled warningly. The storm wasn’t far away now, although the sun still shone brassily. They had three more rows to go and they had just started on the last of them when out of nowhere it started to rain, heavy, cold droplets of moisture, accompanied by growls of thunder and sheet lightning. Then, without any warning at all, the sky opened above them and rain lashed down, beating at the last remaining few flowers they had not picked.
‘That’s it!’ she heard Neil yell out to her above the sound of the storm. ‘Quick, let’s get this lot inside before they get damaged.’
She wanted to protest that there were still flowers to pick, but she knew Neil was right, and as he bent and gathered up his full trugs she followed suit. She was out of breath and soaking wet by the time she reached the drying shed, but thanks to Neil’s foresight the polythene with which they had covered the trugs had kept the flowers dry.
Inside the drying shed, she stared out at the now almost black sky. The small amount of flowers which she hadn’t picked would be lost, but at least they had saved the bulk of them. They had saved, she acknowledged painfully, realising how very different the situation would be if she had not had Neil’s help. She turned to thank him, but the words stuck in her throat.
‘I’m soaked,’ he told her, ‘and so are you. Let’s get inside and get dried.’
Nodding tiredly, she headed for the cottage, aware of Neil at her side even though she didn’t look at him. The storm showed no signs of abating, rain lashing at the windows.
‘We could both do with a hot shower and a strong cup of coffee,’ she heard Neil saying behind her. ‘Any chance of you being able to do anything with this?’
He held out his T-shirt, and she saw that it was soaking wet.
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‘I’ll put it in the drier,’ she answered.
He came to stand beside her and asked quietly, ‘What about the rest of your flowers?’
‘Mostly autumn flowerers,’ she told him tiredly. ‘With any luck, they’ll survive the storm. They’re all properly staked and tied, and if anything’s going to damage them it will be the wind and not the rain.’
‘Who’s going to shower first?’ he asked her. Rue was too tired to care. She gave an exhausted shrug.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ he suggested, ‘I’ll shower first and then I’ll make us an omelette or something, while you have yours.’
She knew she ought to tell him that she wanted him to go home, that she didn’t want him here in her cottage, but she was too exhausted to even contemplate arguing with him, and so instead she nodded and slumped into one of the kitchen chairs as he headed for the stairs.
Outside, the rain pounded against the stone walls. Wearily she got up and made her way into the sitting-room, striking a match to light the fire that she always kept made up in there. The cottage felt warm enough, but on stormy nights she found that a log fire was somehow comforting. It made her feel secure and safe. Tiredness seemed to have invaded every bone in her body, and her muscles ached. She longed to lie down and go to sleep.
Instead, she acknowledged tiredly, she would have to go upstairs. Neil should have finished in the shower by now.
CHAPTER SIX
WINCING at the pain in her back, Rue climbed the stairs slowly. At the top she stopped and rubbed the small of her back tiredly. From the landing she looked out at the rain-lashed garden below. Her herbs would suffer very little damage from the storm.
In the field beyond the garden, there were long, flowerless green rows where they had picked the flowers. The sight reassured her. Disaster had been avoided, thanks to the almost miraculous intervention of Neil.
The bathroom door opened behind her, but she was too tired to turn round. She felt the steamy heat surround her and then Neil was standing behind her.
The sky had lightened a little now, the thunder only a distant growl. The noise the heavy rain made drumming down on the roof was oddly comforting. It felt good to be here inside her cottage, protected from the elements raging outside.
‘Shower’s free,’ Neil told her, and she turned round to tell him that his T-shirt was still in the drier and then froze, her mind going stupid with shock.
One of her towels was wrapped around his hips. The silky hair on his chest was damp. Tiny beads of moisture collected on his collarbone and ran down the centre of his chest. Their movement fascinated her; she was unable to drag her gaze away, and she had an odd, compulsive urge to reach out and catch the droplets as they fell.
She saw his chest lift and fall, heard a soft rumble and realised he was talking to her. She lifted her bemused gaze to his face. His eyes had gone so dark that they looked almost as black as his hair, and that, still damp from his shower, curled slightly at the ends. She wanted to reach up and touch it…to touch him, she recognised on a sudden shuddering wave of self-realisation.
‘Rue.’ She heard him say her name sharply once, as though in warning, and then when she didn’t respond to it he said it a second time in a different tone, softer, and yet with a hint of unmistakable challenge.
And even then she couldn’t drag her gaze away from him, from the darkness of his eyes that seemed to burn into her, from the odd paleness of his skin around his mouth as though he were under an almost unbearable burden of tension, and from his mouth itself.
With eyes like a sleepwalker’s she focused on it, unable to look away.
And then, shockingly, the spell that had held her immobile was broken as Neil cursed briefly under his breath and took hold of her.
‘What is it you want, Rue?’ he demanded unsteadily. ‘Is it this?’
And then his mouth, the mouth she had stared at and yearned for until her body ached with the need burning inside her, was on her own, kissing her; not as she had ever been kissed before, but with a fierce, unrestrained male need that touched a chord somewhere deep inside her, bringing her quiveringly, singingly, to life.
She moaned helplessly beneath his mouth, oblivious to reality, totally lost in the dream world she had stepped into. She felt the hard pressure of his body against her and reached out despairingly to touch the hot, moist male flesh. She felt him shudder beneath the tentative stroke of her fingertips, and drew in a sharply ragged breath. Her head was swimming, her body drowning in sensation. She had a sharp, imperative need to know what it would be like to feel his body against her own without the sensation-dulling intrusion of her clothes.
Her breasts swelled and ached, sensations she could dimly remember experiencing long, long ago, but never like this…never with this sharp, almost unbearable pressure that made her cry out in protest and cling to him.
As though the meaning of the inarticulate cry was immediately known to him, Neil lifted his mouth from hers and whispered thickly against her lips. ‘Yes! Yes!’
And as she looked up into his eyes she was dazzled by their dark glitter, spinning free of the known world in a place where only the two of them existed.
She felt his hands on her T-shirt, tugging it free of her body while she stood, deaf, dumb and blind to everything bar the need burning inside her. She shivered when cool air touched her spine, and then moaned softly in pleasure and shock as Neil’s hands spanned her ribcage.
‘You’re perfect…perfect…do you know that?’ he told her rawly, and her head tipped back languorously under the pressure of his mouth as he caressed the smooth line of her jaw, and then her throat, with tiny, biting kisses that became abruptly more intense as he reached the swell of her breasts. His hands cupped her, burning her flesh through the fine cotton of her bra. His fingers found the hardening centre of her breast and traced it urgently, as though unable to resist the temptation. She felt the quickened thud of his heart and her own pulse mimicked its unsteady beat. He muttered something quick and savage against her body and she trembled with delight and arousal.
Her breasts, so sensitive to his touch, ached tormentingly as he dragged away the unwanted barrier of cotton. Against the darkness of his hand, her skin looked flawlessly pale, milk-white and blue-veined, her nipples flushed darkly pink. She felt hot and weak and oddly boneless, as though she had no ability to move unless he commanded her to do so. His hand supported her spine, his hair still damp as he lowered his head towards her breast.
Her whole body pulsed with desire and need…a need she had experienced before, centuries ago. Blindingly she suddenly remembered that need…surely a pale shadow of what she was feeling now, but a need none the less. Then, too, she had wanted to give herself, to give and be given…to love. And then had come the bitter shock of reality…the knowledge that she was neither loved nor desired.
She heard Neil moan as his mouth found the swollen peak of her breast and fastened on it, bathing it with a moist heat that sent sharply piercing darts of pleasure hurtling through her body.
But it was too late. The weakness that had stolen away her reason had lifted and she was able to see reality again. Neil didn’t want her, he wanted her land.
With a tiny sob of anguish, she pushed him away. He released her reluctantly.
‘It’s no good,’ she told him huskily. ‘I know why you’re doing this. You’re just like Julian. You’re all the same. You think you can coerce me into selling my land to you…’
The flat, metallic grey of his eyes frightened her, but she wasn’t going to let him see it.
‘I want you to go. Now…’
‘Like this?’ he demanded grimly, and she realised that all he was wearing was her towel. Mesmerised, her glance clung to the dark line of hair arrowing down over his belly.
‘Rue,’ he said softly, ‘let me…’
‘No,’ she interrupted sharply, panicked by her own vulnerability to him. ‘You’re wasting your time. I’m not as stupid as you seem to think. I might ha
ve fallen for that trick once, but I’m not falling for it a second time.’
He looked at her for a long time and then he said quietly, ‘Yes. I think you’re probably right. Your husband wronged you, Rue, no one could deny that. When I first realised the truth about you, I thought how brave you were, I admired you for it; but now I realise that you’re not brave at all. You’re a coward…a coward who’s hiding behind her bitterness and resentment…who’s using the memory of one bad experience to keep the rest of the world at bay.
‘All right, so your husband cheated you and hurt you. I’m sorry for that, very sorry, but I’m not your husband, Rue. I’m a different man with a different set of feelings.’
‘But not a different set of motives,’ Rue shot at him. ‘You want something from me just as he did, and you don’t care what methods you use to get it, just like him.’
He looked at her, and the odd mixture of pity and contempt in his eyes made her want to cry out that he was not to look at her like that.
Without a word he stepped past her and into her spare bedroom, leaving her staring numbly into space.
She was still standing there, her eyes huge with anguish, when he came out, dressed once more but minus his T-shirt.
‘In the circumstances, I don’t think there’s much point in my staying, is there?’ he asked her quietly, and even though her mind shrieked triumphantly at her that it had been right and that he had only wanted to deceive and use her, her heart ached with a pain so intense that she had to turn away from him in case he saw it in her eyes.
He stepped past her as though she was unclean, his every movement rigid with dislike. She knew she ought to thank him for what he had done, because, whatever his underlying motives, without his help she would have lost well over half her crop, and that meant all her profit, but the words just wouldn’t come.
She didn’t go downstairs until she heard him leave the house. She still hadn’t had her shower. She was wet and cold, and her teeth were chattering. She went into the sitting-room where she had lit the fire and knelt down in front of it.